Every successful publishing venture means that someone, somewhere, has been betrayed.
* * *
So then, this is life . . .
What happens to people isn’t what they deserve but, rather, what fits them best.
So why does there have to be pain? Why should there be pain if the endings to our stories fit us so well, as though death made us more beautiful?
One womb casts us forth into another, and all of us arrive here in the same way. Yet we never ask why there’s only one form of birth, but so many forms of death.
With sorrow’s nightly raids, I’d been assassinated by the perfume of a man who’d just died, leaving me nothing but the odour of time, and a mountainous city with a penchant for scaring you with the bridges of unknowing and bottomless valleys of misfortune.
Through the ambushes life sets for us, Fate had proceeded, slowly and deliberately, to blast my illusions.
This was what had happened. So had it been nothing but a hypothetical love?
He had known enough about her to love her.
She had known enough about him to love him.
Even so, neither of them had known the other well enough.
Despite my sadness, I left the cemetery feeling more or less content.
If every joy entails some degree of sadness, then it should come as no surprise to find that every sadness entails some degree of joy. It’s a joy we feel ashamed to recognize, but those gifted with the creative spirit know it well.
I have to admit, it made me happy to be rid of that notebook. For an entire year I’d gone on writing on the pretext that it was my only way of staying alive. This wasn’t true at all, of course, not only because writing is the ideal prescription for spending your life isolated from life itself, but because in this country in particular, it’s the charge on which you’re most likely to lose your life.
So, after getting rid of it, I decided to explore the virtues of ignorance, the blessings of being illiterate in the face of love, death, and the world. I didn’t know how easy it would be to descend into ignorance. Even so, I’d always believed Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s observation that, ‘The writer . . . is someone who knows how to go up and down the ladder of life with perfect ease.’ I may have spent my life going up and down that ladder without letting on that I’m out of breath. Actually, it’s the words inside me that are out of breath. And that’s why I am a writer.
I came home a woman stripped of all desire, a woman who had nothing of that story left but a perfume stored inside her body, the perfume she still dabbed on occasionally as a way of getting a rise out of memory.
A scent is the last thing left to us by those who depart, and the first thing asked of us by those who return.
It’s also the only thing we can offer to assure them that we’ve been waiting for them.
This is why, when a certain great lover by the name of Napoleon sent news of his victory to his wife, he asked her to keep her scent for him, saying, ‘Don’t take a bath, Josephine! I’m coming home in three days!’
Alone among military commanders, Napoleon had mastered the art of conversing with women and allowing himself to be defeated before their femininity with the same passion with which he defeated his enemies.
As for me, I had decided to take a bath that evening and go to bed!
Before that, I would sit with my mother after having neglected her for so long. I had also been neglecting my brother. My mother had been pestering me to write to him, but I hadn’t done it since I was so distracted with that notebook and the life of fiction I’d so immersed myself in.
No sooner had I freed myself from my slavery to writing than I was overcome by longing for Nasser. The longing came on so suddenly, it frightened me, and filled me with pangs of remorse.
How could I have abandoned him all that time? Why hadn’t I thought about all the tricks life might play on him in his place of exile?
How could I have lived all that time without him, without his grumbling and complaining, his sarcastic remarks, and the quarrelsome affection that meant more to me than all the romantic sweet talk in the world?
I decided to write him a long letter. It would be as beautiful, as poignant, as unsettling as a love letter. I wanted to show him my mischievous side. I wanted to make him laugh, to make him cry in the hope of winning him back. I even told him I’d be willing to ask my husband for a divorce if that would make him happy, although I also made it clear that things were improving between the two of us.
I wanted to celebrate my return to life, and to serve notice of this to everyone around me. I wanted to share in their ordinary existence, with its mundane preoccupations and trivialities, with its chitchat and its boredom, with its joys, sorrows, its dangers. I wanted at last to become an ordinary woman again, with a family and a home.
My husband was the beneficiary of my suddenly renewed interest in him, which rescued a relationship that had been stricken with a tepidity for which he could see no reason, and he worked to win me back with small gestures.
As usual, my mother understood nothing of what had happened to me, and contented herself with taking over my entire schedule.
For example, she spent the entire first day dictating a letter to Nasser, and the first thing she did the next morning was to remind me to send it.
I was about to give it to my husband so that he could send it for me, but then I remembered that I needed to keep Nasser’s address a secret from him.
Consequently, I had no choice but to get dressed and go to buy an envelope and some postage stamps from the stationery shop.
I was leaving the house for the first time in two weeks when I was accosted by unexpected autumn winds. An approaching grief suddenly came over me, taking me by surprise like a rain storm that comes one season too early.
Shop windows were displaying warm winter coats for the coming season, while stationers’ offered displays of books, notebooks, pencils and pens.
Life was preparing for the end of one season and the beginning of another – preparing to start all over again.
As I saw children running to school with their book bags, I remembered that the last time I had come to this shop was exactly one year before, and that I had come there to buy exactly the same items.
As on this occasion, the weather had been autumnal and enticing, though what it was enticing one to wasn’t exactly clear.
For the last two weeks I had been an illiterate woman who avoided questions for fear that she might get an irresistible urge to write.
It was the beginning of the school year, as I recall . . .
The sky was putting on a new face between one season and the next, while a writer was renewing her ink supply between one book and the next.
The shopkeeper was engrossed in arranging his new shipment of school supplies, spreading an array of notebooks, pens and pencils before me.
And on this day, as the year before, he stopped and came over to me, set his load of new notebooks on the table that stood between us, and asked me hurriedly what I wanted.
I was about to ask him for envelopes and postage stamps when . . .
Glossary
‘All the Arabs’ lands are my lands’: a pan-Arab anthem entitled Bilad al-`Arab Awtani, composed by Syrian politician, military leader and poet Fakhri al-Barudi (1887–1966) and set to music by Lebanese composer Mohamed Flayfil (1899–1985).
André Gide: winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, French writer André Gide (1869–1951) was known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works.
Bendjedid: a reference to Chadli Bendjedid (1929–2012), who was president of Algeria from 9 February 1979 to 11 January 1992.
Ben-idir: a kind of hand-held drum, often made of wood and goatskin, which is traditional to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
Basisa: a dish made from roasted wheat, chickpeas, fenugreek and lentils with turmeric and cumin, served variously with butter, honey, ground almonds or peanuts, figs or dates.
Borge
s: born in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was a novelist and poet who also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. He went blind in his fifties due to a hereditary condition. He came to international attention in 1961 when he received the first International Publishers’ Prix Formentor.
Eid al-Adha: the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, the most important holiday of the Islamic year, commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his eldest son in God’s honour, and God’s provision of a ram to replace Abraham’s son.
Eid al-Fitr: the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.
Fatihah: the first chapter of the Qur’an.
Jubba: a long outer garment, open in front, with broad sleeves.
Little mama: when an Arab mother addresses one of her children, male or female, she calls him or her ‘Mama’, as though the child were a reflection of herself. Similarly, an Arab father addresses his child, be it a girl or a boy, as ‘Baba’ (‘Daddy’).
Rodin: known for his realism and his celebration of individual character and physicality, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) has been viewed as the progenitor of modern sculpture.
Tammina: a dish made from a mixture of honey, clarified butter and chickpea flour. The name of the dish is derived from the same root as the Arabic verb tam’ana, which means to check on someone or reassure oneself that someone is healthy and safe.
Yukio Mishima: the penname of playwright, poet, novelist and film director Kimitake Hiraoka (1925–70). Viewed as one of the most important Japanese authors of the twentieth century, he was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Algerian novelist and poet Ahlem Mosteghanemi is the bestselling female author in the Arab world. She has more than 6 million followers on Facebook and was ranked among the top ten most influential women in the Middle East by Forbes in 2006. The previous book in her trilogy of bestselling novels, The Bridges of Constantine, was published by Bloomsbury, and has been translated into several languages and adapted into a television series.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR
Nancy Roberts is a prize-winning translator with experience in the areas of modern Arabic literature, current events, Christian–Muslim relations and Islamic thought, history and law.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Non-fiction
The Art of Forgetting
Fiction
The Bridges of Constantine
Also available by Ahlem Mosteghanemi
The Art of Forgetting
The Art of Forgetting is an elegant and warm-hearted meditation on love, damage, survival and restoration from an exhilarating stylist. As the title suggests, this book offers women advice on how to move beyond the destructive men in their lives and onto a better and more fulfilling existence. Full of wit and warmth, from an author who speaks from her heart and head at one and the same time.
‘For more than a decade, the Algerian writer and novelist Ahlem Mosteghanemi has been the love doctor for females in the Arab world … A heartwarming new book’
The National
‘The most successful woman writer in the Arab world’
Forbes
‘Rather like a box of chocolates to be dipped into; some of its chapters are soft and sweet, others are dark and mysterious, crunchy with a bite, or unexpected like a salted caramel’
Banipal, UK
www.bloomsbury.com/AhlemMosteghanemi
http://bloomsbury.com/uk/the-art-of-forgetting-9789992194515/
Also available by Ahlem Mosteghanemi
The Bridges of Constantine
Khaled, a former revolutionary in the Algerian war of liberation has been in self-exile in Paris for two decades, disgusted by the corruption that now riddles the country he once fought for. Now a celebrated painter, Khaled is consumed with passion for Hayat, the daughter of his old revolutionary commander, who unexpectedly reenters Khaled’s life. Hayat had been just a child when he last saw her, but she has now become a seductive young novelist.
The first novel in an award-winning, bestselling trilogy that spans Algeria’s tumultuous recent history, The Bridges of Constantine is a lyrical and heartrending love story.
‘A window into a different world’
Daily Mail
‘Remarkably insightful … Astonishingly poetic … I stopped and marvelled every few pages … The Arab-speaking world shouldn’t get to keep Mosteghanemi’s novels all to itself’
Independent on Sunday
‘The tumultuous story of Algeria over the past 50 years, framed by a powerful love story’
The Times
www.bloomsbury.com/AhlemMosteghanemi
http://bloomsbury.com/uk/the-bridges-of-constantine-9789992195444/
First published in Great Britain 2015
First published in English in 2007 by The American University in Cairo Press
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2007, 2015 by Ahlem Mosteghanemi
English translation copyright © 2015 by Nancy Roberts
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 5729 8
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
Chaos of the Senses Page 27